The Effect Of Instructional Language On Minority Students In College English Teaching

The instructional language refers to the language used by English teachers in foreign language classroom teaching. It is an important parameter in pedagogy. The instructional language adopted by English teacher in classroom falls into two: English-only and English-Chinese. The use of instructional language has become a controversial issue in the language pedagogy. Generally speaking, in terms of the use of the instructional language in foreign language classroom, there exist two controversial viewpoints: some advocate forbidding the use of the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom. Others approve of the use of the mother tongue timely and limitedly in the foreign language classroom.The two controversial contentions leave English teachers in a dilemma. On one hand, most English teachers try to limit the classroom language to English only; on the other hand ,they become more realistic about the needs of students to mother tongue and try to provide bilingual support timely. As is well-known, the instructional language adopted by teachers in classroom will directly influence student's learning efficiency to a great extent. Many researches and discussions with regard to the teacher's use of the target language and the mother tongue as instructional language have been done by linguistics and language teachers abroad and at home, however, up to now, much of the research done by Chinese scholars has been theoretical; there has been very little experimental research, especially less experimental research for minority students ,who are third language learners. Their native language is the first language (mother tongue) while the Chinese language is their second acquired language; English is the third language. Their learning process is influenced by these three languages. Moreover, due to the fact that most English teachers are not Tibetans and they know little about Tibetan language. Under such circumstance, which mode of the instructional language will be helpful in students' English learning, English-only or English-Chinese? Motivated by such a situation, the author intends to investigate which mode of instructional language is more effective in improving the minority college students' English learning.The interview, questionnaire and teaching tests are used in this study. The statistical results from interviews, questionnaire and tests show:1)The majority of the students and teachers think that Chinese should be used timely and limitedly in classroom teaching.2)The use of Chinese is helpful in improving the students' motivation and self-confidence.3) The use of Chinese in classroom is also helpful in creating a good classroom atmosphere and making the students more active in classroom activities.4)The classroom teaching experiment have proved that the use of Chinese make the learners benefit greatly not only in vocabulary and grammar but also in reading comprehension and translation.Based on the results of this study, the author ventures to put forward some constructive suggestions with regard to the nationalities college classroom English teaching.